Extreme sarcasm activist with an "I Love Orlando Police" sign

An activist who believes in "extreme sarcasm" carried an "I LOVE OPD" sign to a rally protesting the arrest of Food Not Bombs members who fed homeless people without a license. When a TV crew came to ask him why he, alone, was standing up for the Orlando police, he deployed the "extreme sarcasm" to very good effect.

Except the gay male ones, or the trans ones who like men, or maybe the male ones already in committed relationships, or the young ones, or the very old ones, or the male ones who actually care about the issues, or the…

Why not just require a license to be homeless in Orlando? Then you could just sic the police on the homeless. Obviously, it’s the homless who caused the problem in the first place by attracting the do-gooders.

If the police refuse to enforce tyrannical laws, they become the agents of liberty, not tyranny.

I want people, members of my community, as cops; not simply machines that look like men (like soldiers?) blindly following orders from above, without question, all the while rigourously enforcing whatever commands may issue from that same source of authority upon the rest of us.

Remember the Nuremberg judgments? Simply “following orders” does not serve to clean dirty hands! Nor does such make you any less of a force aiding tyranny against society.

And besides, the necessity for discretion in the actual enforcement of the laws is too obvious for any who have had worked a beat, to need discussion.

But you are correct, overall: that the blame must lie with the legislators, that is, those entrusted with the command of these urban para-military forces, and not those “soldiers” charged with carrying out their orders, who must bear the greatest share of guilt and blame, if blame there is to be, for the imposition of tyrannical laws.
But nevertheless the police following those orders are guilty and blameworthy too. It seems to me that you are willing to give them a pass, provided that they followed their orders, without question or demur.

The discretion of the police, properly exercised, is a great benefit to our societies, and in fact essential to the functioning of any system of criminal justice; or indeed, not only for the police, but for any empowered regulation of the conduct of others by the use of rewards and punishments, whatsoever.

Rules alone, even the best of them, won’t cut it: you still need good people in law enforcement trying to actually make things better, if you hope to build a good society, a good place, to live in.

We (and police) are people, not rule-following machines. And that is NOT a problem, it is on the contrary, a very very good thing.

The elimination of police discretion would be an unalloyed evil: but OTOH, and IMHO, the elimination of one or two of the laws they are called upon to enforce would be an unalloyed good.

Oh damn – I got this thread confused with the thread as to the police in Seattle leaving an automatic weapon laying around, and that’s why I referenced “the gun”…it goes without saying that the cops should also follow the rules, in addition to enforcing them!

wow, good for this guy that he got off his ass and went out to comment on something that’s so obviously a symptom of a flawed system. that being: someone was arrested for giving food to homeless people without a permit!?

look, i understand the rationale behind requiring a permit to feed the homeless. there is a tiny possibility that someone could misuse the act of feeding the homeless to insidious ends. but how about crafting the law to allow police to be supportive, take the name and id of whoever is handing out food and move along. if the state can’t/won’t take it upon themselves to care for people on the street, don’t try to hinder independent citizens trying to help their community.

Why aren’t more people protesting from sea to shining sea? That’s easy, they’re lazy, over fed, over privileged, and dumb as cattle. We won’t really miss our rights until they’re all gone and the Police in the USA make the KGB look like kittens.

The 4th amendment is on the rocks, judges are allowing no knock warrants that are leading to the murder of innocent Americans. No one is held accountable when Cops murder citizens. Habeas Corpus is still suspended. Obama said he’d fix that. Republicans and Democrats pushed through a new and even more sinister Patriot Act which should have been grounds for protests from coast to coast. Police harass and attack citizens with cameras.

The Police arrest people on any charge they like or can dream it up since the Patriot Act makes it easy to at least try. You can resisting arrest for simply asking “why?” Sure, it just gets tossed out later but it still affects the citizen. The police are using military tactics and means to do their job (a violation of the US Code of Justice). Every single American should be out on the streets in protest every day until this all changes. Until this slippery slope is stopped and we get our country back.

Can we expect the youth of today to do something about it? Nope, too busy texting and playing MOH. They’re clueless.

We need a nation wide overhaul on our Police, or we are screwed as a republic.

The only difference between him and some of the actual crazies out there is the subtle smile.

I’d use the same approach regarding border/immigration policy, i.e. I’m glad we have someone enforcing the law for the law’s sake, because we can’t have people coming here to work hard and try to better themselves.

I’d use the same approach regarding border/immigration policy, i.e. I’m glad we have someone enforcing the law for the law’s sake, because we can’t have people coming here to work hard and try to better themselves.

I’d rather have every law get enforced and let people get outraged at the bad ones. If the police pick and choose what to enforce then bad laws get hidden from public attention. Also, they can occasionally enforce those laws on people they don’t like.

Our border/immigration policy is the same thing taken to a grander scale. Rather than create and enforce a sensible policy, we turn a blind eye and create a huge disenfranchised underclass of non-citizens.

So is this ironic:
Everybody misuses the term “ironic” on the net.
Now, up pops a perfect example of irony (man professing beliefs he does not hold).
Everybody on the net misuses the term “sarcasm” to describe it.

To good effect? Nah. In-your-face sarcasm just alienates people. It would have been more effective to play it 95% straight so it sounds like you’re really a supporter, but that last 5% is where you use subtlety to point out the farcical nature of what you’re trying to protest.

If I hadn’t just woken up, I’d be able to make my point more clearly. Damned nighttime ibuprofen leaves me groggy.

Who, the TV editors? This is a little more of what I was thinking about…

“I’m here to support the Orlando Police Department. These police officers are out here 24 hours a day, seven days a week, keeping us safe and protecting our freedoms, and this is the thanks they get? Sometimes these protesters go too far.

The police were following the law when they made those arrests, so the protesters here are basically protesting the law. Who gave them the right to do that? THEY should be the ones being arrested because they’re basically saying ‘We don’t like that law.’

I’m sure the council members here in Orlando had a perfectly good reason for requiring permits to feed the homeless. I’m not sure exactly why they did, but we voted them in, so we need to trust them. And think of this – I’m sure there would be fees for getting those permits, so by not getting them they’re pretty much being tax evaders. Also, the money that would be brought in by paying those permit fees could be used by Orlando to do the very thing those other people were trying to do – feed the homeless. So in that case, those people wouldn’t even have to try to feed the homeless, and they wouldn’t have had to get permits, because the city would be doing the same thing with those permit fees.

I’ve never had a problem with the Orlando police officers, so I don’t have any reason at all to protest what they’re doing.”

As the intent is clearly revealed by the use of the tool, people take the “shortcut” to save time and ink, and refer to the tool by referencing its intent.

But it has happened sometimes that people mistake an honest statement for an expression of irony, and an embarrassing faux pas in the response can be the result. It is one of the hazards of responding to ambiguous statements, I suppose.

A bit OT, but iirc, the repetition and composition of satires were one of the 9 things for which a citizen of Rome could be legally put to death under the laws of the Roman Republic.

So sarcasm has not always been simply a “laughing matter”. Particularly so, for the powerful.

I thought it was clever but missed the point. Asking individual cops to pick which laws they want to enforce is actual tyranny. Voters who elected the city council which made the laws are the real ones to blame.